After four years, the class of 2016 has transitioned from students, to alumni. Six graduating seniors have reflected upon their undergraduate experiences. Brandon Wagner, from Huntsville, Alabama, discusses his time at Emory.
Putting my time at Emory into words is something that still confounds me. How do I sum up four years of life, much less one that fundamentally shifted the conception of who I was and still sees the dust settling on who I am? And does Emory even get to claim responsibility for that? After all, couldn’t this have happened anywhere during my time from age 18 to 22?
Well, yes, but also no. Emory, for all its beauty and all its scars, is really the only place I think I could have done what I’ve done. Before anyone leaps to put what I’m about to say in the admissions brochure, I don’t think I can earnestly say it’s a universal reason, nor can I say it’s a reason that is necessarily positive for everyone.
I was never pre-professional. I never put myself on the train to Deloitte or medical school or a top-seven law school. And because of that, I spent a lot of time thinking Emory wasn’t really interested in me or sure what to do with me. I still think that.
But Emory gave me just enough rope to pull myself up, just enough resources to utilize, through our amazing Film Studies department, through the Wheel, through the four years I spent with the Emory International Relations Association and through Atlanta.
I had to carve my own path, because it felt like nothing else would. And that’s what Emory gave me–the earnest need and desire to find who I was and just enough to show me the way forward.
Do I thank Emory for that? Sure, this community has given me a lot, and I hope I’ve given something back. Would I do it all again? It’s too soon to tell; probably not.
But I’m glad it happened, that’s for damn sure.
Opinion Editor | Brandon Wagner is a College Senior from God Only Knows Where, America studying Film and Media Studies with a minor in Religion. This is his first year for the Wheel, in a likely misguided experiment to be a film critic. When he's not writing on the biggest blockbusters or the films of Spike Jonze or Andrei Tarkovsky or Zack Snyder, he's writing on comedic television, the future of gaming as an art, or the relationship between audience and cinematic experience. In other words, Brandon Wagner has basically nothing else going on but this.
That was pretty callous and mean, John. If I were you I would ask myself if I’m a gentleman. The world is already a rude enough place to a young man just starting out like Mr. Wagner, the redoubtable reviewer. It doesn’t need such screed.
“I was never pre-professional. I never put myself on the train to Deloitte or medical school or a top-seven law school. And because of that, I spent a lot of time thinking Emory wasn’t really interested in me or sure what to do with me. I still think that.”
I had similar sentiments 26 years ago when I graduated, and the job market in 1990 was probably as lackluster as it is now. Good luck with your career and if you want to “go professional” there is still time for that too, as there was for me.
Sorry, but I took what was written as if it were written by someone who just bounced around through school with no plan. And doing that does little to actually prepare a person for the real world.
Seems to me that a LOT of students do that and then wonder why they’re in deep debt and unemployed. And IF these students have a loan, they frequently default and the taxpayers end up paying their bill.
Your point is valid and well said.
However, young people have for decades been sold the idea that college is THE KEY–the key to what, of course, is the question.
It may be that such a question was never asked, and I agree that too many young people bear the illusion that college, by itself is THE KEY without ever asking themselves what they will be doing with that key.
It’s quite a transition from being a pimply seventeen-year-old minor to being a 23-year-old ready to make his mark in the world. It’s a transition that I’d say Emory is becoming ever more inadequate to foster. As proof I’d say (with evidence provided in Emory’s own Wheel) that Emory students are less mature than ever.
But I digress a bit, because the mission of Emory is decidedly not to help students become adults. The self-appreciating Emory community, by its own words: “Emory University’s mission is to create, preserve, teach, and apply knowledge in the service of humanity.”
If you are unspecific about your mission, it’s difficult to fail, and Emory’s leadership has thus seen to it that it will seem superlative in its own Potemkin village (with paid pictures of Jimmy Carter on the cover).
If I had the time and the posterboard, I’d parade around Emory with a sign this Fall, asking “who are you?” and “Why are you at Emory?”
Ultimately, liberal arts colleges can remain viable if they help their own students succeed (not just “humanity”). Now more than ever students should go to Emory not because it is destination that is anymore especial than the dozens of colleges with smug administrators and huge endowments, but because it will help them become what they wish to be AFTER Emory.
If the students can achieve that much self-awareness on their own, then Emory will (by mere accident) be doing that much more to serve “humanity” and not just its cloistered leftist agenda.
We’re in agreement for sure. From what I’ve seen in the past, we usually are.
Indeed it is not Emory’s job (or any other university) to make these kids into adults. They should be that by the time they reach their sophomore year at the very latest.
When I was in school (engineering) if you didn’t know what you wanted to do by the start of your second year, everyone was looking at you saying “What are you DOING here?” Back then reality was in vogue (although waning) and “feelz” were irrelevant. Today substance is a bore (Frank Zappa) and “feelz” is its substitute. Truly sad state of affairs.
These kids should quit being over-privileged whiners and get on with an actual, useful and productive education. You’re exactly right – the university should not be the destination, but the key.
BTW… I love the posterboard idea. Much like Watter’s world, I’d love to get incoming freshmen responses on video.
The difference is that Georgia Tech DOES indeed make people into engineers, whether or not they are adults, just like the Emory Business School makes students into accountants. Working today might make better adults than education and certainly, planning is a prerequisite for being responsible.
However, the mirage of American higher education makes liberal arts education appear to be something other than what it is.
I don’t necessarily consider that the fault of the students anymore than it is their parents, their guidance counselors or their school. A little wisdom will go along way, but a lot of obfuscation and confusion about higher education goes a long way too. “Let the buyer beware” isn’t appropriate because most Emory students are having their education paid for them, and the dilemma of higher education in America is discussed the way some subjects like racism are discussed by America’s president. These are conversations about having conversations about having more conversations, but as long as federal and other grant money keeps flowing in, these institutions can wreak all the havoc their little leftist minds want. Privileged? I think the administrators and professors are the ultimate in privileged, producing ridiculous papers, doing garbage research and teaching very few very little at all.
American liberal arts higher education is a mess, especially the social studies, where many courses and studies are just plain idiotic. I wouldn’t blame a 20-year-old for missing that fact.
You can’t blame a naive adolescent for taking seriously the Emory motto: “The Wise Heart seeks knowledge.” It’s a valuable lesson to learn that most Emory careerists care little for wisdom or knowledge–an expensive lesson, but still a valuable one.
What should be evident is that increasingly so, one needs to look elsewhere besides Emory University for wisdom and knowledge.
Again, we agree. However, I tend to hold “adults” to a higher degree of discernment than they seem to be currently displaying.